


sentinel

by owenmeany



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Dancing, F/M, Guilt, Implied Sexual Content, Personal Growth, Post-Canon, Ransom is a Bastard Man, but barely any I am a huge wimp and bad at nsfw content apologies, me writing heterosexual romance was a Change and one I didn't mind tbh, reference to violent act at end that does not take place, unfulfilled yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22656922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owenmeany/pseuds/owenmeany
Summary: "He was entirely despicable and yet — if held in the right way, suspended in fear, down on his knees and made to work for it — he was also an equal."He guards her, and this is how she knows she has won.
Relationships: Marta Cabrera/Ransom Drysdale
Comments: 12
Kudos: 197
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	sentinel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunavagant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunavagant/gifts).



In the later years, when Walt had put someone on her case to follow her around and breath deeply down the phone, she found herself bored by the threat. Her mom liked to travel between family friends, and Alicia was at college; with all that time alone, she knew that Walt (and not unreasonably Linda and Don) thought it was the best time to intimidate her with near-constant surveillance. But she was accustomed to being underestimated, belittled, seen as unworthy - and besides, she liked the house best when it was empty, the way Harlan had most often occupied it, enjoyed walking through corridors and running her fingers along the wooden panelling, even when she knew that the men on the Thrombey money sat outside, just beyond the drive.

She was in the habit of going to visit him, when she could. Inconspicuously, concurrent with her mom’s travels, wearing her reading glasses and an oversized coat of Harlan’s, as though she were a character in one of his many novels. He would sit in the booth in his terrible jumpsuit and watch her. Occasionally he would laugh at something she said, about someone else; usually a high-society individual revealing the same prejudices that were entrenched in his family, seeing her as undeserving and manipulative. Their mistake was in revealing this passively, in veiled comments about her legality and status. But it was easier for him to make light of this from behind thick glass.

“You’re still Marta,” he said, once, and the phone rustled against his cheek as he adjusted his hand, and the noise distorted and seemed soft through her line. “You won’t let them change you.”

“You tried, though.” She leaned forward in her chair.

He nodded, smiled. She liked when he looked down at his own hands. His face looked delicate, breakable, peeling at the edges. “And I failed.”

“One of many,” she shrugged, and half-heartedly explained the men in the drive who took her picture when she left the house, which made him frown. “Don’t be a hypocrite.” She put a finger against the glass and pressed hard, until the skin around her nail was white and blotchy. “It makes you seem boring.”

Around the home she began to clean out any evidence of Harlan’s family. His books and his computer she retained, the art he had curated, the strange and dark props. Sometimes in the evening she would sit the chair of fake knives and read his unfinished notes. It made something in her chest scratch as she breathed in; seeing his handwriting, messy and curled, as though he had left the book lying around and would wonder in shortly, looking for it. Knick knacks and personal items were thrown out or shipped away. She wrapped Meg’s books in paper and sent them cheaply to her home address. In his study there were photos of the family in their childhood. Even little Linda, who looked happier without the intervening years of life. Most she packed away and stored in the attic - imagine, a house with an attic - with space not for living but for keeping, near wasteful after the apartment she grown up in. In a plain wooden frame was a faded photo of Harlan and a boy in his lap. Ransom, she thought, and suddenly sat down. He looked less angry as a child. His face retained a kind of quiet seriousness but the grin was different, too open, too kind. She set the frame down and went to talk to Harlan’s portrait. One or twice her sister caught her and she had carefully persuaded her not to tell mom. It was not some sign of illness, she had reassured her, only a symptom of absence. Acutely, all day, she felt the desire to reach out and talk to him, make him laugh, and he was simply gone. 

“What do you think?” The portrait was silent. His smile always seemed warm, his eyes crinkled, as though he were unable to take the painting itself seriously as he had posed. She nodded. 

In the room with the chair she lay on the floor with one of the props and tried to remember how it felt when Ransom had pushed her down. She jammed the knife against the tight knitted ridges of her jumper over and over, its blade retracting as she lay there, watching her own chest and rise and fall. She closed her eyes and thought of him, his face, the blue of his irises, the convulsive twitch of horror that ran through him as he realised what he had done. Or not done; the slight parting of his lips, the way he shifted a second before they roughly pulled him off her. She had felt his heart beating through his chest, smelt the vomit in his hair, and most crucially, she thought, seen the terror that possessed him. It was the same terror she had felt being pushed by Harlan down the stairs and out of the study, turning back to see his body across the divan.

During his weekly phone call she had tried to explain the feeling. That he was entirely despicable and yet — if held in the right way, suspended in fear, down on his knees and made to work for it — he was also an equal. After he made probation she installed him on the drive, which made her mom mad. Alicia found it easy to ignore because most of the time that she was actually home, she kept to her room upstairs anyway. But she allowed him to stay and eventually, begrudgingly, her mom accepted it, learned to walk past him on her way out without acknowledging him. 

He sat on the porch. It was the closest he had come to proper labour. All day, every day, watching the cars that lined the road down the end of the drive. Eventually the numbers dwindled. Sometimes he would break the terms of parole to beat one of Walt’s associates, drag him out of the passenger’s seat and onto the road. To her great surprise, there were better times. He slept on the couch and in the mornings she brought him coffee. Not because she had to, but because she enjoyed it; sitting down next to him, seeing him huddled on the bench outside in his coat, remembering how he had looked as they last parted. Vicious little bitch, he had spat, in her face, at her feet, and now he sat outside the house that used to be his birthright and watched. And he looked at her with such suspicious gratitude, just for a little thing like that. In the summer she opened the windows and played Harlan’s old records in the lounge. He would listen, turn his head towards the sound, but never move, even whilst she danced around, bare feet on the carpet. He stood like a stone guard outside a tomb. He was here for as long she could keep him, and he was almost entirely hers. 

“Standing sentinel?” she said to him that first summer, sticking her head out the window. He turned. 

“What did you say?” There was no wind. His shirt stuck to the back of his neck.

She smiled. She knew he had heard. Even if it upset him, there was not a thing he could do. Pliantly he accepted the bottled water she passed through the window.

“Would you come join me?”

He looked out over the drive at the two remaining SUVs. “I don’t think I’d enjoy that.” He unscrewed the cap and drunk. She watched the line of his neck as he swallowed, throwing his head back, base of his skull lightly brushing the window ledge. “I don’t think you know how.”

She let the music drift, stretched and eerie, as she left the lounge, wondered into the oversized hall, opened the front door and crossed the porch to meet him. He didn’t say more as she dragged him back across the threshold. He came in at night all the time anyway; why should it be any different now she was there?

She made him take off his shoes and watched for the gritting of his jaw as he did so. Then she unbuttoned the pressed sleeves of his shirt and rolled them up to elbows. He looked smaller when he wasn’t wrapped up in thermal clothing. She stepped forward and took his hand in her own, leading him around the carpet, twisting on the floorboards where she knew they were weak so the damage was audible and the wood groaned. Not accidentally she stepped on his toes, pulled him too fast, forced him to stand still whilst she twirled under his big arms and delicately sang. Come on, she breathed, come on down, you got it in ya … until he was stood watching her move in her own ungainly shapes around the room. She grinned. She put one hand on her waist and the other on her shoulder and made him lead her in some kind of formal circle. His feet moved with regulation, not with grace but instead a trained memory. She watched as he moved for her, simulated the feeling of dancing, eventually finding some pace and swinging her around. Her hair flew out, her fingers tightened around his arms and she found herself breathless. When he set her down he was breathing hard. He looked at her for a long moment and then made his way outside. That night he didn’t come inside at all. In fact, once he sat on the bench, he did not rise, and in the morning did not look at her as he accepted the drink.

She delighted in making him feel regret, or as humanly close as he could come to that feeling. She had him drive her to Fran’s grave but wouldn’t touch the flowers, instead having him lay them down, look at her picture framed against the headstone, note the previous offerings left by it, the clumsily written notes and cards. 

“That’s what you have to understand,” she said. “It’s a human cost.” In the car he nodded and turned off the radio, expecting her to speak. But she didn’t, so he went on listening to the silence, waiting for a lesson and receiving only her disinterest. 

Later Benoit’s letter came in the mail. All was written normally and well, with explanations of his most recent case, the disappeared heirs in the Louisiana swamps, anecdotes of skewed social interaction, his friendship with others, his general happiness; he had a nephew who was beginning to write stories, he relayed, and would benefit from meeting a character with a kind heart. Punctuating the end, other than his name and titles, was a question unattached to the body of the text. I hope you know what you’re doing, he had written, in beautiful sloping cursive. 

Of course I don’t, she began her reply, and then she crossed this out and began again. It seemed heavy-handed. 

It was at night sometimes that she registered the old concern that he would creep up and strangle her, hurt her family, set the place on fire. Early on during his stay, her mom had made the cousins come by the house and install locks on all the bedroom doors and windows. But she always left her door unlocked, thrown wide open, inviting. He knew where she was. If she died she would be exactly like Harlan, and then the money would pass to her family, and he would still never see a cent of it. Come, she found herself asking every night now, praying, reverent, remembering the feeling of the floor at her back and the sound of the music: lie over me again. Let me feel your pulse. Let me know that you’ve lost. Let me know that you’re mine.

**Author's Note:**

> ao3 user lunavagant: once again i hope this is okay! i wanted to fulfil more than one of your requests and i loved this film so much!! i hope it's okay. i tried to strike a balance between compelling romance and also making ransom pay for being a Bastard Man. it's a bit all over the place and lacking in nsfw. i am a huge wimp. big sorry.
> 
> i'm here on tumblr [(x)](https://om-johnirv.tumblr.com)


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